Nov 2
We are bargain hunters, all of us. We make bargains with God, with reality or the cosmos or karma or whatever. We are convinced someone or something out there is keeping score, that our lives are like a bet we are daily making that the things we do are somehow a reliable indicator of the things we will get. Read more
I have a long list of tasks that require my attention this afternoon, but like many others no doubt, my mind keeps drifting back to an image of a little boy on a Turkish beach. A little boy who, along with his brother and mother and father set out on an unsteady boat toward an unsteady future. A little boy who, along with his brother and mother, never made it to his destination. It shouldn’t take a picture like this to move us all, I know. There are horrible things happening around the world every day. And the image of a little life cruelly cut short should never be used as click bait.
But that picture… Christ Almighty, that picture! Read more
Every day, it seems, the refugee crisis in Europe worsens. Every day, the headlines that jump out at me when I open my computer in the morning are grim and foreboding. Last week it was capsized boats and trucks on the side of the road. This morning, it’s a train station in Budapest where police are preventing thousands of migrants from boarding trains bound for Germany. And tomorrow? Next week, month, year? Who knows? Read more
I ran into two friends this morning for whom the month of August is an excruciating one. Two fathers for whom August is the anniversary of the unimaginably painful loss of a young daughter. For both, August brings an acute reminder of the ever-present reality of the gaping wound at the heart of their lives. For both, August means the rehearsal of a crippling loss that no parent should have to endure.
It is impossible to think of these two friends and their losses without thinking more generally about fathers and daughters. Read more
I’ve been thinking about fatherhood over the last few days. I suppose Father’s Day last weekend got me started, although the day itself was a fairly muted affair around these parts. Oh, it’s Father’s Day? Um, well, happy one of those, dad… Yawn. Which was mostly fine with me. I’ve never been a terribly enthusiastic participant in the dictates of the Hallmark calendar, anyway. Read more
The headline grabbed me right off the bat: Alberta couple blindsided after adopted girls turn out to have fetal alcohol disorder. The story was heartbreaking in the way that only stories about wounds inflicted from close proximity can be. A couple took on two foster kids but one of them quickly proved to be quite a bit more than they could handle, There were repeated assaults of her sister, there were angry words and abuse, there were doors locked from the outside and alarm systems set up, there were desperate calls to social services. There was the shrapnel of toxic rage flying around shredding everyone in the vicinity. Read more
Near the conclusion of his remarks about the final recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission yesterday, Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde offered the following challenge to non-indigenous people: Make room.
Make room in minds and hearts for new ways of understanding and relating to indigenous people. Make room for conceptions that go beyond “drunk” or “lazy” or “entitled” or “pagan” or any of the countless other stereotypes about indigenous people that not only still exist in the broader culture, but flourish. Read more
The day started promisingly enough. I opened my eyes and the sun was trickling through the blinds. I remembered that it was Monday, and that Monday was my day off, and that I like Mondays. I thought about a leisurely morning spent in the front porch sun with a good book and a cup of coffee. I sighed contentedly. Yes, very promising indeed. And then I got out of bed. Read more
Swim meet, wintry November morning… My daughter and I dutifully bundle up and are out the door and on the road by 7 am. One and a half hours down the prairie highway… The pool is packed, the swim teams assemble with all their coloured caps and logo’d hoodies and impressive looking warm up gear… The top 40 pop music leaks drearily out of the speakers… The parents yawn and clutch their coffees and stare at their phones, waiting, waiting for the first race…
And so, another summer is gone and it’s back to school. This morning we coaxed and cajoled two reluctant teenagers out the door approximately three hours earlier than they had grown accustomed to being anywhere or doing anything over the course of the summer. Out the door for another year of glorious personal growth and social interaction and intellectual stimulation. Or something like that. Judging by the looks on their faces as they trudged out the door, about the only thing on their minds were the beds they had been unceremoniously dislodged from. Read more
A few observations and reflections as a summer holiday draws to a close…
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My son is convinced that he has discovered gold in the sand. We are at a beach and he sees little flecks of shiny sediment as he digs and builds on a hot summer afternoon. He tries to imagine ways that he might extract this “gold” from the piles he has collected. He asks about how the gold miners panned for gold back in the olden days. He takes a Frisbee and swishes the sand around. He fills up an old discarded coffee cup with his sand, wanting to bring it home. He is convinced there is gold in there—treasure that he, alone of the thousands who have tramped up and down this beach, he alone of the innumerable kids who have built sand castles in this exact spot—has managed to discover.
“There’s no gold in this sand,” I tell him flatly. He is not dissuaded. He sighs and looks at me with something like pity or exasperation. You just don’t understand… Read more
The mind of a teenage boy is, I am discovering, a fearful and wonderful thing. Beautiful, strange, unpredictable, irrational, surprisingly generous, unspeakably kind, maddening… All within a few hours, sometimes. Yesterday, I bought my son new strings for his guitars as a few of the old ones had snapped. He came home from a youth event at 10:00 convinced that now was the time to re-string his guitars and not go to bed. His father disagreed and the stage was set for a rather unpleasant end to the day.
But the sun is in the habit of rising anew each day, full of promise and possibility.
My son has a backpack. It is an old, weather-beaten backpack that has been kicking around our house forever. I think it was my backpack once. It might be almost as old as my son.
This backpack bears a great many strange burdens over the course of a given week. Books, clothes, playing cards (he likes to do card tricks), miscellaneous scrunched up permissions forms that his parents were supposed to see two weeks ago, rocks, guitar picks, a (usually half-open) lunch container spilling out its uneaten contents, sweaty sports uniforms, dirt, and an assortment of the other inevitable accretions of a preteen, male life. Sometimes I have to open the backpack to retrieve something, but I try to do this as infrequently as possible. Sticking my hand into this backpack is a very frightening thing. Read more
I was driving my son to guitar lessons the other day, trying to keep up while he talked a mile a minute. I was only half listening (shameful, I know), but in one of his stories I caught the word “priest.” This isn’t a word he uses often, and my curiosity was piqued. I’m always curious about how my son understands the weird and wonderful contours of the church/religion-land that his dad happens to inhabit. I think my world is a bit of an oddity to him. He knows that I read books and talk to (and at) people, that I busily bang away on my laptop, writing sermons, writing articles, writing, writing, writing. But I sometimes think he wishes I had a more respectable job. Like building things or selling things or fixing things or growing things… things you can see and touch in the real world. Or teaching zombie apocalypse preparedness courses. You know, something useful. Read more
Part of this past weekend was spent in Medicine Hat, AB where my son had a basketball tournament. Medicine Hat would probably not be thought by many to be a remarkable place. The city’s main claim to fame is probably the world’s largest teepee (the “Saamis” teepee, the Blackfoot word for the eagle feather headdress which was translated “Medicine Hat”) that sits just off the Trans-Canada highway near a historical buffalo jump. But aside from that, Medicine Hat is a lot like so many other windswept prairie towns. There are pockets of beauty, to be sure, but it’s mostly brown, flat, nondescript. There is the now familiar exodus of business and commerce from the downtown area, to the outskirts of town where there is plenty of cheap land for the innumerable fast-food joints and big box stores that pop with alarming speed and regularity, and the vast oceans of asphalt parking lots for the jacked up pick up trucks, SUVs and mini vans that rumble down its streets. Medicine Hat is an ordinary prairie town. Somewhere most people are passing through on their way to somewhere else. Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, wherever. Forgettable.
But Medicine Hat is not forgettable for me. Read more
I know a girl who loves to laugh. She has a smile that can light up a room and a kind and compassionate heart that loves to seek out the sad, the lonely, the forgotten. She is also, like many kids her age, a little forgetful, a bit careless at times. Her head has been known to wander up into the clouds, far from the more terrestrial concerns that occupy the minds of her parents and other adults in her life. She doesn’t do many things quickly. She cheerfully lives life at her own pace.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If we have a memorable experience in the age of smart phones and social media and don’t digitally capture and share it, did it really happen? Read more
What if we just made God up?
The question came not from a despairing parishioner or a reader of my blog or an inquisitive university student at a trendy coffee shop. No, the question came from my twelve-year-old son at a sushi joint last weekend while drumming on the table with his chopsticks in between green tea and California rolls. Read more
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